Queer, Disabled Iranian Identities: A Story in Fragments

Shayda Kafai

Queer, Disabled Iranian Identities: A Story in Fragments

Shayda Kafai

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I will speak to you today in fragments, in a pilgrimage through moments and histories. My own experiences as a queer, disabled Iranian American woman exists, after all, in this place of fragmentation.

Queer Iranian Identities: A Story in Fragments Shayda Kafai MALCS 2015 Conference I will speak to you today in fragments, in a pilgrimage through moments and histories. My own experiences as a queer, disabled Iranian American woman exists, after all, in this place of fragmentation. Home means many things. It can be the literal roof and doorway, the place your heart travels to. Home can mean, “belonging” and “permanence,” “safety always.” For me, home spoke at a different, fractured register. At times, home was supportive and loving. At other times it was a place that privileged silence, an oppressive quiet that washes over everything as if to say, “we look normal,” “we are normal.” In my house, so much was communicated in the gaps, in the forced ways we wore perfection. In his discussion about queerness and homeland, professor of English, David Eng writes that queer folk are “suspended between an ‘in’ and ‘out’ … between origin and destination, and between private and public” (32). This suspension is even more complicated when an individual is a queer person of color. In this talk, I will traverse the locations of home and belonging, the “in” and “out,” as a queer, Iranian-American woman, though first, I need to pause here. As I occupy and seek to queer traditional concepts of a Iranian family and home, I need to acknowledge the cultural absences queerness. How can I speak to you about the existence of queerness in a culturally Iranian home when, as Shadee Abdi shares in her ethnography of culture and sexuality, “The Islamic Republic of Iran not only denies the existence of gays and lesbians but paradoxically considers homosexuality a capital crime?” Here is the terror that follows the nameless, the anonymous. How can I share with you the feelings that come from my diasporic experiences when my motherland is presented to be “without” queerness? In this project, I seek to reconcile my queer diaspora with my culturally Iranian home. Using “queer as a conceptual tool that disrupts” (Fortier) the myths I was taught about the nuclear, heterosexual home, I craft routes that are antithetical to the invisible and intolerable roots of queerness in my family mythology. In reflecting on my roots and engendering new routes, I unsettle the internalized shame that attached so fiercely to my sexuality. *** My mama and baba came to the states right before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. By the time I was born in 1983, they were no longer practicing Muslims, though in truth, baba’s family was never religious. Though we grew up in a home where Islam was not woven into the everyday, my sisters and I certainly grew up aware of religion’s presence: I knew what was “good” and “correct.” I know that in our culturally Muslim home, morality was synonymous with heterosexuality. *** Minimal scholarly work exists exploring gay, lesbian, or queer Iranian narratives (Abdi). This absence results in a violent silencing, one that leaves me stammering and without language. Queerness and Iranian-ness resist one another here. They confront, antagonize, and repel. In Abdi’s essay, she writes that this gap creates a space wherein “the denial of voice becomes problematic and detrimental for the community.” My queer self grew from this origin point of omission, the place where silence is culturally and politically promoted. *** When I was in the sixth grade, mama took my aside and asked me to meet her in the bedroom closet. Tucked under her arm was a biology book from the 1950s. In that small space, behind that closed door, she opened the book to a page where man and woman stood side by side one another. Pointing to a black and white drawing, she said “this is a man and this is a woman. They are a couple.” So much was communicated to me then, in that closet, the place where things are held back, secretive and hidden. Returning back to Eng’s framing of queerness as being “in” and “out,” I understood in that moment that to be “in” was to be coupled—man and woman—though “heterosexual” was a word I never learned outright in those early years. Even in those crude drawings, queerness was communicated as being “out,” as “haram”, or forbidden. Reflecting back now on this project of root tracing, it still surprises me that I have yet to meet a queer family member, “out” or otherwise. Queer desires and queer identities were taught to all of us in our different generations as shameful and worthy of hiding. As I became older I felt this totalizing absence as one rooted in homophobia and heterosexism. Even now I can’t recall a word in Farsi for gay, lesbian, or queer outside of the derogatory slurs. These were not words I was taught and words that I consequently search for. Even though I desire this language, I need to pause and ask, if it’s Eurocentric of me in and of itself to want to find a translatable version of these words. When reflecting on the challenges faced by what he names “sexual minorities” university counselor David Mair says that “we frame our lives through narratives, but we are each colonized by the pre-existing narratives of our social worlds which drive the way we think of ourselves and the very way we live our lives.” My social world was crafted by perfection, by the Iranian American lens wherein the self is a reflection of the larger familial community. In our diaspora, so many thousands of miles away from home, we were taught to maintain the traditions and beliefs of our parents and grandparents, of which queerness did not exist. I was colonized by the social narrative that being open about and accepting queerness would render my family as abject and damaged in the eyes of the community. As a teenager, I did once ask mama if perhaps a cousin of mine in Iran had yet to marry because she was gay. The reply was sharp: “khodah nakoneh. god forbid.” She told me to knock on wood to deafen the devil’s ears, making queerness an impossibility. I learned that same sex attraction, queerness, was against the narrative of an acceptable, Iranian American woman: khodah nakoneh. This phrase regulated the choices I made into my late 20s. I remember. I recall middle school and my violent colonizations of self. I wanted to take her, girl, to that place where junior high schoolers danced, rubbed and rooted together. I had learned from culture and family that distance, that memory loss, was best. In her exploration of queerness and home, sociologist Anne-Marie Fortier writes that for queer folks, the belief that the home is our origin, our starting place, is inaccurate. For her, we are “always already not-at-home in the childhood home.” Fortier argues that in the process of owning our queerness, we often un-see our homes as sentimental, safe places; in contrast to this mythology, we need to create places where we remember ourselves. We sat in the park on the white bench that was no longer white, my mother and I. First, I told her that I was attracted to women, that I craved this noun “woman.” Mama then said, “I know this about you, and I love you. Just don’t do anything about it.” What I then wanted to say was that sexuality is one part of my being, that I am sculpted by many parts. What I wanted to say was “I am still here.” In the norms of our Iranian American home, heterosexuality meant that I could be a reflection of pride and success for our family. Queerness brought the negation of these things. *** As a queer Iranian American woman who is examining my roots on this queer journey, I realize the importance of this migration. Not migrating to a particular place, city, or country, but rather migrating to a queer home of my own choosing, a place where queer and Iranian as identities can collectively belong. Not only is this self-fought for place constantly in flux, but as Fortier argues, it is filled with “ghosts revived from the past.” To my knowledge, I am the only person who identifies as queer in my family and in our diasporic community. How many others of us are staying silent, ghost-like and wandering? As far as we are from our homeland, we have been taught to maintain the invisibility and nonexistence of queerness. Although my family has begun to create routes away from this, I know that I must create my own diasporic home. I must trespass, must move past history and culture, to craft something new and queer entirely.

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Queer, Disabled Iranian Identities: A Story in Fragments

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